


There once was a man from Peru...

by Sunny_Beanz



Series: Whatever our souls are made of... [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Limericks, M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, brief allusion to sexual activity but it's honestly barely even there, is it really an au in this case?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:21:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27439492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunny_Beanz/pseuds/Sunny_Beanz
Summary: In a world where soulmates have the first words they say to each other tattooed on their skin ( before they meet ), it turns out that the immortals' words change every time they die and come back.Joe finds a way to amuse himself while Nico recovers from his latest death.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Whatever our souls are made of... [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2004658
Comments: 15
Kudos: 320





	There once was a man from Peru...

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a starter post I made for a tumblr rp thread that got reblogged/liked by a lot of people. 
> 
> It's been living in my brain ever since, and sparked inspiration for a bunch of soulmate au fics.

Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammed al–Kaysani had grown up and gone to war with words he didn’t understand scrawled across the skin.

Almost everybody had words from their soulmate tattooed on their body, the ink ( in the exact penmanship of their other half at the point the two would meet ) growing in when the children were between seven and eleven; nobody knew how, or why, nobody understood how such things could be predetermined – they just trusted that they _were_.

Some were luckier than others, in both placement and word choices.

Some, like Yusuf's friend Amir, had the words _watch where you're going, shithead_ scrawled across his shoulder ( he'd later bump into the other half of his soul, and fall instantly in love as an angry retort died on his lips – truly a story for the grandchildren to laugh at ).

His parents were the luckiest – everybody agreed. The two of them bore small, matching tattoos around their ring fingers ( his father's on the right, his mother's on the left ), both reading _hello_ in tiny, perfect letters that had appeared when his mother was seven and his father was nine. They'd found each other only a year and a half after that, lived a few streets away from each other in the same city, married young and had a family. But it was rare that such a thing happened, rare that fate decided to be so kind and neat to two people who shared a heart, who shared _everything_ in their lives.

Fate seemed much more prone to playing cruel jokes on those unsuspecting lives it affected so deeply.

Yusuf's own words appeared the year he turned nine; clumsy, unfamiliar letter inking themselves on the left side of his ribcage – centred over the exact point his soulmate’s blade would later pierce him, killing him for the first time.

_Pater noster, qui es._

Yusuf would read the words to himself every night before he slept, tripping over the unfamiliar syllables he'd heard his father murmur the day he'd shown Ibrahim the marks with absolute _pride_ , _waiting_ for the day that somebody would finally say the words to him. It became something of a prayer outside of those he already said, something that he could focus on, could ground him in seconds when he felt himself slipping into stress or anger over the years.

It didn’t matter how much he bothered his father ( whom he _knew_ could speak many languages, whom would never look at him in the same way he had before ), or how many merchants he asked in however many markets they visited about the words, _nobody_ could ( would? ) tell him what those words meant.

It was frustrating, to say the least.

Outside of the walls of Jerusalem, Yusuf finally got his answers – and once again, fate proved to be as cruel as ever.

The Franks had invaded and Yusuf, like many of his friends from home, had joined the battle against them in an attempt to save their holy land from the invaders. Many of his people were still fighting when Yusuf looked around as he pulled his blade from the chest of an invader he'd killed instinctively – the man had come charging toward him with a yell, loud and graceless, and what was Yusuf to do if not react?

From the corner of his eye, he saw another man, his head down despite the fighting, both hands resting on the pommel of his sword. Yusuf ventured a little closer, careful to move quickly and quietly, his bloodied blade ready for the attack that would inevitably come. As he drew nearer, he observed that the Frank's eyes were closed – a _very_ stupid move – as his lips moved silently.

The stupidest move, however, belonged to Yusuf – not watching where he was putting his feet, he stepped into a hole in the earth and grunted as his misstep twisted his ankle painfully, the Frank's eyes shooting open once more as he spun, blade in hand.

It was a short fight, once Yusuf had managed to free himself from the hole. The Frank, who had the distinct advantage of two working feet, drove his blade forward to meet its target, the metal slicing into flesh with little resistance. There was nothing left to do than try to take out his murderer as the man shut his eyes again, bowed his head and began to speak – but the words that escaped the pale man's lips were enough to pull Yusuf up short.

“ _Pater noster–_

 _No_.

No, this couldn't be happening.

This man, this _invader_ , could _not_ be the other half Yusuf's soul had been promised.

He wouldn't accept this cruel trick – he _couldn't!_

But the words kept spilling from the man's mouth as Yusuf continued to bleed and writhe in absolute agonised fury, spitting up at the Frank with all the stress he had left.

“– _qui es–_ ”

Yusuf's last act was to drive the blade of his scimitar through the Frank's chest, cutting the words off a second before they both died side–by–side.

–––––

When he woke after that first death, the words ( and the man ) were gone, replaced with new words that would later be spit at him just before he died again.

And again.

And again.

The pattern held until a couple of decades after his original death, a single new word – _Nicolò –_ scribbled carelessly on the palm of his hand.

The original words Yusuf had been attached to for so long had faded away, just as they’d fade away after every death that followed, replaced with different words in different places, sometimes ones that would meet with Nicolò’s touch, sometimes ones that didn't. There was no pattern, no rhyme or reason to the size or placement of the lettering, nothing predictable about it at all.

_Nicolò._

He barely had to ask when they met again, but the words were right there, ringing around the Frank's pale wrist when his sleeve rode up after Yusuf had posed his question.

_What is your name?_

“ _Nicolò_.” The answer came, soft and reluctant, Nicolò's hand pointing to the word that was very clearly visible on Yusuf's hand.

“You're going to die, Nicolò.”

They both did, in the end. Yusuf with a blade, and Nicolò with a rock.

–––––

The words came and went over the years, morphing from threats to basic questions to desperate pleas.

It wasn't until they met Andromache and Quynh that they really began to understand a little bit of what was happening, that they realised that their gods weren't going to strike them down on the spot, that they were still far too _young_ ( Yusuf snorted at that particular statement ) to die without warning.

Different language variations appeared as the years passed. Latin, Greek, Arabic, Zeneize, Tounsi, French, English... all the languages the two of them spoke appeared on their skins at one point or another, though some were more likely than others to appear.

It wasn't until the fifteenth century that Yusuf broke the pattern and tried for something _else_ instead of the depressingly desperate pleas for consciousness that had become the norm as he waited for Nicolò to wake from his most recent death – poisoning at the hands of a local innkeeper who turned out to be truly and utterly inept at picking non–toxic mushrooms for the evening meals he prepared for his guests ( an awful way to die ). Yusuf, having read Chaucer's _Canterbury Tales_ and copied some of his favourite lines onto a sheet of parchment so he could take it with him wherever they went, took the sheet from his pocket, eyes searching for a line to make himself smile.

“For if a Priest, upon whom we trust, be foul, no wonder a layman may yield to lust.” Oh, it _did_ make him smile, but even as he spoke it aloud, he _willed_ the words to appear somewhere a little more privately than some of the previous.

( “You were the foulest,” Yusuf tells Nicolò later on, when they're sitting together, his fingers stroking over the words that run from hip to hip across the Ligurian's lithe body, “It's little wonder that I yielded to my lust.” )

( Nicolò pays him back in kind, the words _we know little of the things for which we pray_ spiralling around Yusuf's thigh after he dies in a petty squabble over a mule. Yusuf laughs raucously when he sees, and tells Nico that he knows him in every way there is to know a man ––– and then proceeds to use his mouth to prove the point oh so deliciously. )

–––––

By 2019, they make a game of it.

It's still not _easy_ , when the other dies ( in fact, the times when Nico is in danger – the times Nico _dies_ – might be the only times Joe can't control his anxiety these days ), but Joe keeps a couple of pocket-sized notebooks with funny lines of poetry or quotes from somewhere else he likes, and it helps a little bit while he waits for Nicky to come back to him.

Booker – whose wife's words had faded from his skin when she'd died – often thanks the God he hasn't believed in since the nineteenth century that _he_ isn't Joe's soulmate. Dying repeatedly, he says, is bad enough without also having to worry about what might have appeared on your skin during that time too. Nicky just gives that barely–there–smile of his and says that the not knowing is half the adventure.

Besides, they've had their fair share of embarrassing marks ( which, admittedly, led to a _no unnecessary deaths_ rule – if Joe didn't want _IDIOT_ scrawled across his forehead for however long he managed to stay alive that time, he shouldn't have gone jumping off a cliff to get away from Booker's crowing over football, should he? Even _despite_ not expecting it to be so dangerous at the bottom, it had been an unnecessary risk to take since they still didn't know how old was old enough to die permanently ), and in a world where almost everybody has the same sort of markings, such things ceased to be embarrassing after a while.

\-----

Nico had died this time around, and Joe had been promising something better than the _well, that was stupid_ that he’d blurted out onto Nico’s skin last time. He kept a small notebook of lines he thought of, lines he found along the way as they continued to live and survive and move around. Flicking through his notebook as he waits for Nico to wake from a particularly gruesome stomach wound, he clears his throat with a smile, settling on a couple of lines he thinks will amuse his love — his only hope is that the words didn’t appear anywhere that might cause serious embarrassment ( there were only so many times one could wake up with _idiot_ on their forehead before one gained a reputation and had to suffer through years of wisecracks and snide comments about it ).

“There once was a man from Peru,” Joe begins with a wicked smile and one hand in the other half of his soul's sweat-damp hair as Nico stirs, his eyes fluttering like butterfly wings, “who fell asleep in a canoe–”

“I _will_ make you regret this if you put something awful on my skin.” The itching of it's started on the soft skin of Nico's right forearm, speaking of words the world would be able to see until he died the next time. “You don't want to hear the rest of it, _habibi?_ ” Was it his imagination, or did Joe sound disappointed? Nico managed a small smile – a grimace, really – as he attempted to push himself up into a sitting position. “Not _particularly, cuore mio._ I have a guess as to how it ends.”

“Oh _really?_ ” Joe snorts, his hand slipping under the back of Nico's head to help him up. “I bet you don't. The subtle art of the limerick is completely lost on you, Nico.”

Nico makes an offended noise as he rests his head against Joe's shoulder, but the statement is at least partly true – he could never quite get the rhythm to work for him the way Joe could, but that didn't mean that he couldn't appreciate a funny limerick when he heard one.

Joe is silent under Nico's head, his hands busy flicking through the notebook as the other half of his soul continues to recover from his stomach wound. “ _Santa Maria, Madre di Dio_ ,” The exasperation in Nico's voice was fond, breaking through another minute or two of silence, “-tell me, then, if you really want to.”

“No,” Joe pouts, and Nico rolls his eyes heavenward, muttering a short prayer for patience. “Yusuf, if you don't tell me the rest of it in the next _five seconds_ , you'll miss your opportunity forever.” He _feels_ Joe's chuckle more than he hears it – the notebook disappears into a pocket, a water bottle is produced and handed over from the backpack they often bring on missions with them.

 _Just_ when Joe's five seconds are about to run out, he speaks. “The man from Peru in the canoe sees a statue of Venus and ends up with a handful of goo.” There's an impish grin to accompany the words – a grin born of complete mischief from somebody who knows they'll get away with everything in time. “I was going to change Venus to Adonis to make it more relatable.”

Nico finally laughs, the sound bright and unrestrained in a way Nico so rarely is – at least, not when there are others around to witness his emotions. “Adonis makes it _much_ more relatable,” he agrees, unscrewing the cap of the water bottle and downing half of it in one long swallow. The other half is tipped over his head in an attempt to wash away the sweat and grime that's accumulated on his skin – and if Joe gets splashed too? Even better.

**Author's Note:**

> “For if a Priest, upon whom we trust, be foul, no wonder a layman may yield to lust" is a quote from the prologue of the Canterbury Tales ( under the section titled 'The Parson' ).
> 
> "We know little of the things for which we pray" is a quote from The Knight's Tale.
> 
> The limerick Joe quotes is from here ( https://dillsnapcogitation.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/dirty-limericks/ ).


End file.
